Hostname: page-component-7b7567c8c-7pwfn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-14T08:19:34.889Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Punishment and Social Organization: A Study of Durkheim's Theory of Penal Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Steven Spitzer
Steven Spitzer*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get accessRights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For Émile Durkheim, crime and punishment were integral features of organized social life. He considered the study of crime and punishment essential to the sociological enterprise precisely because these “social facts” revealed the inner workings of society and the mechanism through which societies change. In The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim argues (1938:70) that “crime is … necessary, it is bound up with the fundamental conditions of all social life,” and that “it is no longer possible … to dispute the fact that law and morality vary from one social type to the next, nor that they change within the same type if the conditions of life are modified.” Because he viewed law as a reflection of basic social arrangements, Durkheim grounded his theory of social change in an analysis of comparative legal types. He assumed (1933:68) that “since law reproduces the principal forms of social solidarity, we have only to classify the different types of law to find therefrom the different types of social solidarity which correspond to it.” In his central theoretical work, The Division of Labor in Society (1933), Durkheim linked the changing nature of legal controls (repressive to restitutive) to transformations in the nature of social solidarity (mechanical to organic).

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 9 , Issue 4 , Summer 1975, pp. 613 - 637
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 The Law and Society Association.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Andrew Scull and Jan Smith for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. I am also indebted to Cecile Sue Coren and Edna Erez for their assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.

References

BARNES, J.A. (1966) “Durkheim's Division of Labour in Society,” 1 Man 158.Google Scholar
BENES, Vaclav (1952) “The New Legal System of Czechoslovakia,” 12 Journal of Central European Affairs 215.Google Scholar
DALTON, George (1968) Primitive, Archaic and Modern Economies: Essays of Karl Polanyi. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
DIAMOND, A.S. (1971) Primitive Law Past and Present. London: Methuen and Company.Google Scholar
DUBOW, Fred (1974) “Nation-Building and the Imposition of Criminal Law.” Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association.Google Scholar
DURKHEIM, Émile (1933) The Division of Labor in Society. New York: The MacMillan Company.Google Scholar
DURKHEIM, Émile (1938) The Rules of Sociological Method. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
DURKHEIM, Émile (1969) “Two Laws of Penal Evolution,” William Jeffrey Jr. (tr.) 38 University of Cincinnati Law Review 32.Google Scholar
DURKHEIM, Émile (1973) “Two Laws of Penal Evolution,” T. Anthony Jones and Andrew T. Scull (trs.) 2 Economy and Society 285.Google Scholar
FREEMAN, Linton C. and Robert F., WINCH (1957) “Societal Complexity: An Empirical Test of a Typology of Societies,” 62 American Journal of Sociology 461.Google Scholar
FRIED, Morton H. (1967) The Evolution of Political Society. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
GALANTER, Marc (1969) “The Modernization of Law,” in Friedman, Lawrence M. and Macaulay, Stewart (eds.) Law and the Behavioral Sciences. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
HASLUCK, Margaret (1954) The Unwritten Law in Albania. London: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
JUNOD, Henri A. (1927) The Life of a South African Tribe. London: MacMillan and Company.Google Scholar
KULSKI, W.W. (1954) The Soviet Regime: Communism in Practice. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press.Google Scholar
KUPER, KUPER Hilda and (1965) African Law: Adaptation and Development. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
LEIK, Robert K. and Merlyn, MATTHEWS (1968) “A Scale for Developmental Processes,” 33 American Sociological Review 62.Google Scholar
LUKES, Steven (1972) Émile Durkheim: His Life and Work. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
MALINOWSKI, Bronislaw (1926) Crime and Custom in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
MERTON, Robert K. (1934) “Durkheim's Division of Labor in Society,” 40 American Journal of Sociology 319.Google Scholar
MURDOCK, George Peter (1967) Ethnographic Atlas. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.Google Scholar
RADCLIFFE-BROWN, A. (1922) The Andaman Islanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
ROTHMAN, David J. (1970) The Discovery of the Asylum. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.Google Scholar
RUSCHE, Georg and Otto, KIRCHHEIMER (1968) Punishment and Social Structure. New York: Russell and Russell.Google Scholar
SCHNORE, Leo F. (1958) “Social Morphology and Human Ecology,” 63 American Journal of Sociology 620.Google Scholar
SCHWARTZ, Richard D. (1965) “Reply,” 70 American Journal of Sociology 627.Google Scholar
SCHWARTZ, Richard D. and James C., MILLER (1964) “Legal Evolution and Societal Complexity,” 70 American Journal of Sociology 159.Google Scholar
UDY, Stanley H. Jr. (1959) Organization of Work: A Comparative Analysis of Production Among Nonindustrial Peoples. New Haven: Human Relations Area Files Press.Google Scholar
UDY, Stanley H. Jr. (1965) “Dynamic Inferences from Static Data,” 70 American Journal of Sociology 625.Google Scholar
VALKENBURGH, Richard F. Van (1937) “Navaho Common Law II: Navaho Law and Justice,” 9 Museum of Northern Arizona, Museum Notes 51.Google Scholar
WIMBERLEY, Howard (1973) “Legal Evolution: One Further Step,” 79 American Journal of Sociology 78.Google Scholar